Copyright by Lynn Valerie Abell 2011
The Report Committee for Lynn Valerie Abell Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:
Imaginative Appropriation: Confronting Otherness through the Female Body in the Works of Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino
APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:
Supervisor: Guy Raffa
Daniela Bini
Imaginative Appropriation: Confronting Otherness through the Female Body in the Works of Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino
by
Lynn Valerie Abell, B.A.
Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
The University of Texas at Austin May 2011
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Guy Raffa, for his thoughtful and meticulous feedback and unwavering support not only on this project, but over the past two years, and to Chiara Ferrari, whose course on travel literature helped to inspire parts of this paper and whose encouragement led me to a course of study that has brought me much happiness. I would also like to express my immense gratitude to Daniela Bini, whose battle for the first Italian Studies graduate program in the American Southwest made this report possible and provided me with life-changing opportunities. Lastly, to Riccardo Guerrieri for his willingness to drive me halfway across his country to see the remnants of a poet’s impression on a small, forgotten town.
April 29, 2011
iv Abstract
Imaginative Appropriation: Confronting Otherness through the Female Body in the Works of Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino
Lynn Valerie Abell, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011
Supervisor: Guy Raffa This report examines the ways in which Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino use images of the foreign woman as other. Specifically, both authors inscribe foreign territories onto the bodies of their female characters in order to confront complex cultural differences. Italy is the site of this gendered inscription in Pavese’s Il carcere, while various real and imagined foreign lands are made female in Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore and Le città invisibili. In Pavese’s novella, the satyr-like Concia and the overly maternal Elena are embodiments of Southern and Northern Italy, respectively, and the failure of the protagonist to form a relationship with either woman represents his failure to assimilate into the mezzogiorno and his simultaneous rejection of northern society. In Calvino’s two works, female characters and attributes are consciously used to embody various foreign countries so that the protagonists may grasp the unknown, both physically and psychologically. By linking woman and terrain, Pavese and Calvino attempt to dominate distant lands, which are otherwise enigmatic and incomprehensible, in the typical Orientalist fashion.
v Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Pavese, Calvino, and the Evolution of the donna italica .1 Pavese and Calvino: Writing and Wanderlust ...... 1 Orientalism and the Southern Question...... 4
Chapter 2: Pavese in Exile: Foundations of Solitude and Otherness in Il carcere..8 Pavese in Exile...... 8 Il carcere and Imagined Solitude in Southern Italy...... 11
Chapter 3: Calvino in viaggio: Postmodern Pastiche in Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore and Le città invisibili ...... 17 Orientalism in Calvino’s Travel Literature...... 17 Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore: A Pastiche of Heterosexual Male Fantasy...... 21 Le città invisibili: Constructing the Orient around the Female Body ...... 28
Chapter 4: Conclusion: Pavese and Calvino Beyond Postmodernism ...... 34
Bibliography ...... 36
vi
Chapter 1: Introduction: Pavese, Calvino, and the Evolution of the donna italica
PAVESE AND CALVINO: WRITING AND WANDERLUST Before Cesare Pavese decided to take his own life in 1950, Italo Calvino considered him to be a mentor as well as a close friend in the industrial yet picturesque city of Torino: La mia vita torinese porta tutta il suo segno; ogni pagina che scrivevo era lui il primo a leggerla; un mestiere fu lui a darmelo immettendomi in quell’attività editoriale per cui Torino è oggi ancora un centro culturale d’importanza più che nazionale; fu lui, infine, che m’insegnò a vedere la sua città, a gustarne le sottili bellezze, passeggiando per i corsi e le colline.1 That Calvino credits Pavese with teaching him how to envision and interpret Torino is especially significant given that cityscapes are highly visible in many of Calvino’s later works, such as Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore and, of course, Le città invisibili. After the untimely passing of his friend, mentor, and “lettore ideale,” Italo Calvino began to travel extensively, leaving for the USSR in 1951, and after receiving a grant from the Ford Foundation in 1959, he was able to spend six months in America.2 His experiences in the United States proved a surprising source of inspiration; before arriving in New York, Calvino himself swore he would never write a book on America, but upon his return he changed his mind, explaining that “I libri di viaggio sono un modo
1 Italo Calvino, “Forestiero a Torino,” in Eremita a Parigi: Pagine autobiografiche (Milano: Mondadori, 1994), 14-15. 2 Italo Calvino, interview by Roberto de Monticelli, August 18, 1959, in Saggi: 1945-1985, comp. Mario Barenghi (Milano: Mondadori, 1995), 2:2718; Mario Barenghi and Bruno Falcetto, “Cronologia,” in Lettere: 1940-1985, by Italo Calvino, comp. Luca Baranelli (Milano: Mondadori, 2000), liv; Ibid., lix. 1
utile, modesto eppure completo di fare letteratura.”3 Although he later called Paris home for more than twenty years, he forever considered New York to be his city.4 Pavese shared Calvino’s fascination with America, but unlike Calvino, Pavese was never able to visit the country that inspired his tesi di laurea, as Columbia rejected his request for a teaching fellowship in 1930.5 Instead, the furthest Pavese would ever travel from home was to Brancaleone in 1935 as a political prisoner of the Fascist regime.6 Before his deportation, Pavese completed numerous essays on American writers and translated everything from Moby-Dick to Mickey Mouse comic books, but after serving his sentence, he seemed to lose interest in the country that had once enchanted him, as if the harsh reality of exile had extinguished his once idealistic fascination with the land of opportunity.7 Although America, or at least the protagonist’s distant memories of it, did make its way into Pavese’s last work, La luna e i falò, it is the place of his exile that is brought to the forefront in the novella Il carcere, leaving no doubt as to the lasting effect of his experiences in confino on both his writing and spirit.8 Calvino was thus able to realize the voyage Pavese had once dreamed of, and while Calvino was inspired by the time he spent in New York and other major cities around the globe, Pavese was haunted by his deportation until death. But despite the starkly different circumstances of their travels, both authors use similar techniques in converting their experiences away from home into writing. Specifically, both Pavese and Calvino approach their encounters with foreign lands through the female body. While such a claim may at first sound abstract, Italian authors have been using images of woman in order to construct ideas of nationhood for centuries. As Joseph Luzzi observes,
3 Italo Calvino, interview by Carlo Bo, August 28, 1960 in Eremita a Parigi, 143. 4 Italo Calvino, interview by Ugo Rubeo, September 1984 in Eremita a Parigi, 273. 5 Lawrence G. Smith, Cesare Pavese and America: Life, Love, and Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 54. 6 Ibid., 66. 7 Ibid., 169; Ibid., 171; Ibid., 225. 8 As defined by Stanislao G. Pugliese, confino under the fascist regime was “the practice of internal or domestic exile, often to one of the penal islands such as Ustica or Lipari or a remote village in the Mezzogiorno,” in Italian Fascism and Antifascism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 235. 2
the female body was used as a metaphor for Italy at least as early as the fourteenth century, when Dante lamented in Purgatorio 6.78 that his Italy was not a “donna di province” but rather a whorish “bordello.”9 Luzzi traces Dante’s prostitute through Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Alfieri, until she transforms into Leopardi’s beautiful but broken woman in “All’Italia.”10 The Fascist regime capitalized on the nationalistic sentiments of these great Italian poets, wanting to show citizens that the country’s literary icons “embodied Fascist ideas of war, glory, and statism.”11 Luzzi further notes what he considers to be the irony behind such a strategy, given that “in the minds of those same writers the Fascists used to promote a masculine national identity, Italy has always been a woman,” the donna italica.12 Far from ironic, however, I see this tactic as going hand-in- hand with the regime’s militarist and colonialist agenda, as the feminizing of Italy allows for her to be dominated and impregnated by its virile male citizens charged with defending their nation’s honor and fathering her children. While Luzzi sees the metaphor as culminating in Leopardi’s canzone, images of the nation as woman continue even into the postwar era. For example, Millicent Marcus argues that in films such as Paisan, Two Women, and We All Loved Each Other So Much, directors use what she terms the “feminized body politic” as “a sign of resistance, an index of the will to challenge official notions of the Italian national self.”13 Although both Pavese and Calvino were avowed anti-fascists, neither writer uses the female body as a way to undermine the regime and its nationalistic fervor. Instead, both authors utilize the metaphor in attempts to seize and conquer the otherwise intangible, imagined construct of the nation. Pavese and Calvino thus deviate from the
9 Joseph Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 169; Dante Alighieri, Commedia: Purgatorio. ed. Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Quaglio (Milano: Garzanti, 2008). 10 Luzzi, Romantic Europe, 169; Ibid., 189. 11 Ibid., 165. 12 Ibid. 13 Millicent Marcus, “The Italian Body Politic is a Woman: Feminized National Identity in Postwar Italian Film,” in Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and its Aftermath: Essays in the Honor of John Freccero, ed. Dana E. Stewart and Alison Cornish (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 335. 3
classic image of the donna italica, as it is not necessarily their homeland, but rather foreign locales that are inscribed onto the bodies of their female characters.14 By linking woman and terrain, both authors attempt to dominate distant lands, which are otherwise enigmatic and incomprehensible, in the typical Orientalist fashion. In Pavese’s Il carcere, the satyr-like Concia and the overly maternal Elena are embodiments of Southern and Northern Italy, respectively, and the protagonist’s failure to form a relationship with either woman represents his failure to assimilate into the mezzogiorno and his rejection of northern society. In Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore and Le città invisibili, female characters and attributes are consciously used to embody various foreign countries so that the protagonists may grasp the unknown, both physically and intellectually. But before turning to the texts themselves, I will first examine Edward Said’s Orientalism and its relevance to travelogues as well as to Italy’s ‘Southern Question’ in order to show how literature has historically been used to consider and construct otherness and how Pavese and Calvino continue in this tradition.
ORIENTALISM AND THE SOUTHERN QUESTION In his groundbreaking work Orientalism, Edward Said discusses methods used by western travelers in dealing with what is often perceived as “unimaginable antiquity, inhuman beauty, and boundless distance” upon their arrival in eastern lands.15 For example, Edward William Lane, most famous for his English translation of Arabian Nights, decided to manage his uneasiness with foreign culture by meticulously distilling his rich and varied experiences into the twenty-eight neatly divided chapters which compose his Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.16 As Said explains, the perceived “eccentricities of Oriental life, with its odd calendars, its exotic spatial configurations, its hopelessly strange languages, its seemingly perverse morality, were reduced considerably when they appeared as a series of detailed items presented in
14 Although, as Marcus points out, Gabriele D’Annunzio also used the female body to represent the “old, corrupt, Byzantine order” which had to be rectified by La Serenissima, ibid., 334. 15 Edward Said, Orientalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1994), 167. 16 Ibid., 161. 4
[Lane’s] normative European prose style.”17 Writing, then, is one way for an outsider to neatly encapsulate and neutralize the real and imagined dangers of foreign lands. While the places visited by Pavese and Calvino aren’t necessarily ‘Oriental’ in the traditional sense, there is no question that Brancaleone, for Pavese, and places like Russia and America for Calvino nevertheless presented these authors with the same lingual, spatial, and cultural differences that stunned authors like Lane during his travels in Egypt. And although Brancaleone is technically located within Italy’s borders, as a Piedmontese, Pavese could not have felt more foreign upon his arrival in the small town in Reggio Calabria. Of course, Pavese was not the first northern Italian to record what he perceived to be the peculiarity of the mezzogiorno; Italian intellectuals and politicians had long been engaging in what was (and still is) an often radical discourse on the disparities between north and south. As Jane Schneider notes, the ‘Southern Question’ took on its divisive and oppositional subtext after the Risorgimento, so that “by the end of the nineteenth century, Southern Italians were represented in Italy as racial or cultural others whose differences from northerner were intrinsic and for all time.”18 This antagonistic discourse can be examined within the framework created by Said to study the complex relationship between the Western world and Muslim societies of the Middle East and Asia. Nelson Moe’s View from Vesuvius does exactly that, thoroughly tracing the history of Italy in relation to northern Europe, and that of northern Italy in relation to the South in the context of cultural, political, and racial otherness. One of the imagined threats that frequently surfaces in travel literature is the newfound territory’s deviant sexuality. Not only does the outsider begin to relate his voyage to the unfamiliar destination to new and exotic sexual encounters, but soon the land itself becomes ‘woman,’ and, likewise, ‘woman’ becomes the land. This association is not merely coincidental, but functions rather as an integral device employed by the (white, male) outsider in an attempt to conquer his surroundings. A mute, mysterious,
17 Ibid., 166-67. 18 Jane Schneider, “Introduction: The Dynamics of Neo-orientalism in Italy (1848-1995)” in Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country, ed. Jane Schneider (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 12. 5
and highly sexualized female figure is often at the center of various European travelogues, such as those of Gustav Flaubert, and her imagined speechlessness allows the dominating author to imbue his object with those characteristics that allow the subjugation of both the individual female and territory as a whole.19 In Pavese’s novella, the young Concia is the epitome of this speechless, eroticized female form. Similarly, in Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, the narrators speak for the two girls Brigd and Makiko, the love interests in pieces of the novels set in Eastern Europe and Japan, respectively. In Le città invisibili, women are rarely given the opportunity to speak, and when they do so, it is in a sexualized, lustful manner. Another way in which foreign lands are frequently objectified is through their portrayal not as contemporary societies, but as ancient and timeless ones. This tendency allows authors to imbue the Orient with a sense of primitiveness, creating a place “outlasting time or experience.”20 Le città invisibili is a perfect example, as the imagined cities described by Marco Polo are full of mystical and anachronistic elements that remove them from reality. As many critics note, this tendency is also prevalent in the discourse on the mezzogiorno, whose links to ancient Rome and Greece are viewed as a defining characteristic, conveying both positive and negative valences simultaneously. For example, Moe explains that two traditional ways of viewing southern Italy have been in place since the eighteenth century: “[t]he first distinguishes between the natural beauty, climate, and fertility of the south and the degradation of society; the second contrasts the commercial and agricultural prosperity of the south in ancient times, whether under the Greeks or Romans, and its poverty in the present.”21 This mythification serves to immobilize the South, disconnecting it from present-day reality and placing it in a motionless, ahistorical bubble subject to the scrutiny of its northern neighbors. The imagined naturalness of the south is thus not an innocuous, romanticized characteristic, but rather one that allows the mezzogiorno to be viewed as backward, given that it “owes
19 Ibid.,187. 20 Said, Orientalism, 231. 21 Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University California Press, 2002), 46. 6
nothing to progress, history, or the arts and sciences.”22 Throughout Il carcere, the protagonist Stefano makes constant reference to the ‘Greekness’ he imagines to be contained within the foreign territory, allowing him to distance himself from his new surroundings both culturally and temporally. Before examining the texts in greater detail, however, I will first examine Pavese’s time in Brancaleone, not to trace the biographical similarities between his stay and the text, but in order to better understand the author’s experience with and attitudes toward otherness.
22 Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 95. 7
Chapter 2: Pavese in Exile: Foundations of Solitude and Otherness in Il carcere
In August of 1935, after spending several anxious months in the prisons of Turin and Rome, Cesare Pavese was exiled by fascist authorities to Brancaleone, a small town on the tip of Reggio Calabria. This deportation not only provided the author with his first real encounter with the mezzogiorno but also had a profound effect on his literary aesthetic, a change most evident in the novella Il carcere. Written two and a half years after Pavese’s release, Il carcere is a veiled autobiography that chronicles the day-to-day life of Stefano, an exiled engineer, in a small southern Italian town. While the novella is largely recognized as Pavese’s first successful attempt at long prose, Il carcere should also be seen as significant due to its development of themes which would come to dominate Pavese’s later work: insurmountable solitude and the failure of communication. Through his various misunderstandings with the local men, his frustrated fantasies regarding the objectified Concia, and his utter rejection of Elena, the only woman with whom a genuine relationship would have been possible, Stefano figuratively rebuilds the walls of his old prison cell and resigns himself to a solitary life devoid of meaningful human interaction.
PAVESE IN EXILE On August 4, 1935, Pavese arrived in Brancaleone, immediately anxious to receive money and, of course, books from his sister Maria.23 Fascist authorities initially denied him a confinato’s stipend, and it appears his initial days in the small town were spent desperately contesting the regime’s decision while awaiting funds from his
23 Cesare Pavese to his sister Maria, 5 August 1935, Lettere: 1924-1944, comp. Lorenzo Mondo (Torino: Einaudi, 1966), 416-17 (hereafter cited as Lettere). 8
family.24 However, it wasn’t long before Pavese began to observe and interact closely with his new neighbors. He writes to his sister on August 9: “Che qui siano sporchi è una leggenda. Sono cotti dal sole. Le donne si pettinano in strada, ma viceversa tutti fanno il bagno. Ci sono molti maiali, e le anfore si portano in bilico sulla testa. Imparerò anch’io e un giorno mi guadagnerò la vita nei varietà di Torino.”25 In addition to exhibiting the Piedmontese’s flair for dry wit in times of desperation, these sentences reveal the stereotypical attitudes toward southerners commonly held by polentoni and, of course, Pavese himself. Evidently, northerners see their neighbors as a dark, dirty people with questionable hygiene and outdated agrarian customs. Although Pavese begins to question these misconceptions by informing his sister that these people do, in fact, bathe, he nevertheless reinforces the idea that southerners are inherently different and backward. Another deep-rooted stereotype, originating more or less in the mid-eighteenth-century with Montesquieu’s Sprit of the Laws, is the idea of southerner as passionate and violent.26 The day after Christmas of 1935, Pavese writes again to Maria, explaining to her the ‘reasons’ behind his bad humor: “Certo che il clima e il vitto mi dà al sangue. Non bisogna dimenticare che in questo paese, al tempo dei Borboni, si ammazzava per un’occhiata. È colpa dei pepperoni e della latitudine…”27 While it isn’t hard to imagine a certain degree of sarcasm oozing from the letter, once again we have an instance of the northern author acknowledging and reinforcing negative stereotypes of the mezzogiorno. These are more than discriminatory, jocular affirmations, however, as Pavese’s comments also work to confirm his own feelings of solitude and isolation, in effect giving him “la coscienza di essere sempre più un piemontese, lontano dalla sua terra, sradicato dai suoi affetti, senza amore per cui vivere o lottare, solo.”28
24 Pavese to the Ministero dell’Interno, 8 August 1935, Lettere 421; Pavese to his sister, 9 August 1935, Lettere, 422. 25 Ibid. 26 Moe, View from Vesuvius, 24. 27 Pavese to his sister, 26 December 1935, Lettere, 486. 28 Giuseppe Neri, Cesare Pavese in Calabria: Con un’appendice di documenti d’archivio (Marina di Belvedere: Grisolia, 1989), 5. 9
But Pavese’s observations about the people of Brancaleone are not confined to traditional, reductive paradigms. The author also sees a close link between the contemporary inhabitants and its ancient Grecian roots. In the early days of his stay, Pavese began requesting Greek books from Maria and his friend Augusto Monti. In the same letter to his sister in which he declares southerners to be “cotti dal sole,” he requests Greek grammar and exercise volumes, as well as an Italian-Greek dictionary and verb book.29 As early as September 11, he wrote to Monti asking for Greek and Latin classics, and he later attests to having nearly completed translations of “Illiade III, Anabasi I, Lisia per l’invalido, Sofocle Edipo re.”30 In a later letter to his sister, Pavese reveals that his renewed passion for Greek is not merely coincidental: La gente di questi paesi è di un tatto e di una cortesia che hanno una sola spiegazione: qui una volta la civiltà era greca. Persino le donne che, a vedermi disteso in un campo come un morto, dicono «Este u’ confinatu», lo fanno con una tale cadenza ellenica che io mi immagino di essere Ibico e sono bell’e contento. [. . .] Fa piacere leggere la poesia greca in terra dove, a parte le infiltrazioni medioevali, tutto ricorda i tempi che le ragazze [. . .] si piantavano l’anfora in testa e tornavano a casa a passo di cratère. E dato che il passato greco si presenta attualmente come rovina sterile—una colonna spezzata, un frammento di poesia, un appellativo senza significato—niente è più greco di queste regioni abbandonate.31 Here Pavese mythologizes the land of his exile, speaking for its inhabitants and imagining its enduring and eternal Greekness. In the typical orientalist fashion, the writer immobilizes the South, romanticizing its past and lamenting its inevitable decay into “sterile ruins.”32 In Il carcere, Pavese imbues his protagonist with the same ardor for Greekness, which is most evident, as we will see, in the way in which Stefano fantasizes
29 Pavese to his sister, 9 August 1935, Lettere, 423. 30 Pavese to Augusto Monti, 29 October 1935, Lettere, 455. 31 Pavese to his sister, 27 December 1935, Lettere, 489-90. 32 Pavese’s fascination with Brancaleone’s Greek roots can be seen as inspiring later works, such as Dialoghi con Leuco. 10
about the servant-girl Concia and reconstructs her into a mythological, mysterious, and sexualized donna-capra. This mythification not only serves to objectify his love interest, and, by proxy, the South as a whole, but more importantly, it is a way for Stefano to reinforce his feelings of isolation—after all, how can he communicate with a girl, and a society, that he has rendered imaginary and non-existent?
IL CARCERE AND IMAGINED SOLITUDE IN SOUTHERN ITALY While, in most literary works, the voice of author and narrator are to be considered two separate and distinct entities, within Il carcere it is impossible to remain oblivious to the blending and intertwining of Pavese’s voice with that of his protagonist, Stefano. Just as Pavese couldn’t help but note that his new neighbors were “cotti dal sole,” among other things, Stefano makes similar observations regarding his perceptions of southerner’s physical differences throughout the novella. Upon his arrival in the terra sconosciuta, he watches the dark-looking people emerge from their hovels: “Gli antri bui delle porte basse, le poche finestre spalancate, e i visi scuri, il riserbo delle donne anche quando uscivano in istrada a vuotare terraglie, facevano con lo splendore dell’aria un contrasto che aumentava l’isolamento di Stefano.”33 This single sentence offers a wealth of images indicating difference and distance. The abodes of the inhabitants seem like dark, prehistoric caverns, and the women, with their brown faces, are depicted emptying their terraglie, a word that inherently conveys a proximity to land. These perceived characteristics explicitly distinguish and isolate the northerner from his surroundings. Throughout the novella, the locals are continually described as dark and unusual. For example, Stefano often observes young boys playing near his dwelling as they yell “nel loro dialetto, nudi e bruni come frutti di mare.”34 In addition to the difference in skin tone, the children also speak what is practically another language, thus remaining virtually incomprehensible to, and alienated from, the confinato. This inability to
33 Cesare Pavese, Il carcere. 1948, in Tutti i romanzi, comp. Marziano Guglieminetti (Torino: Einaudi, 2000), 286. 34 Ibid., 310. 11
communicate continues throughout the story and stems not only from language differences, but from cultural ones as well. During his first attempts to converse with the local men while passing time at the town’s osteria, Stefano remains unsure of both himself and the southern social norms that leave him feeling like an outsider. As he sits in the bar across from Pierino, the guardia di finanza, and Gaetano, the uncomfortable tension between the northerner and his newfound acquaintances is palpable: Tutti e tre si studiavano, chi pacato e chi beffardo, con un vario sorriso. Stefano si sentiva estraneo a quel gioco e cercava di equilibrare gli sguardi e di coglierne il peso. Sapeva che per rompere la barriera bastava conoscere la legge capricciosa di quelle impertinenze e prendervi parte. Tutto il paese conversava così, a occhiate e canzonature. Altre sfaccendati entravano nell’osteria e allargavano la gara.35 However, Stefano never succeeds in breaking the barriers separating him from the townspeople; in fact, the gulf in understanding only seems to grow during the months he spends in exile. Stefano does manage to create a friendship with Giannino Catalano, the local Casanova, but the engineer remains distrustful and frequent miscommunications occur between the two men. At first, Stefano considers Giannino to be “ostile,” but soon realizes that he wants to extend an offer of friendship after he invites the outsider to his family’s house to give his professional opinion on some blueprints.36 But at the heart of the relationship lies a misunderstanding which taints it with suspicion and unease: Stefano mistakenly believes Concia, the young servant-girl who has become the object of his fantasies, to be the Don Giovanni’s fidanzata. It is not until much later in the book that Stefano finally realizes and admits his error to his friend, after being brought in person to the house of the vecchio Spanò and learning for himself that Carmela, the actual fidanzata, and Concia, the young donna-capra, are in fact different people. While the misunderstanding does not necessarily revolve around differences in dialect, Stefano’s
35 Ibid., 287. 36 Ibid., 294. 12
status as outsider nevertheless prevents him from understanding the subtle connections between the townspeople that govern social interaction. More importantly, however, Stefano’s confusion prevents him from forming a genuine friendship, as his jealousy and distrust stunt what otherwise could have been an opportunity to escape the loneliness of exile. But, in the end, Giannino meets a similar fate as the northerner—he is thrown in jail for having deflowered a girl from a nearby town. As Stefano contemplates the womanizer’s new life in captivity, he gains a strange sense of serenity, both secretly pleased with the irony that he is no longer alone in isolation and grateful “per quel calore e quella pace, e anche per la solitudine che, al brusio della pioggia esterna, lo intorpidiva silenziosa.”37 Giannino isn’t the only person with whom Stefano negates the possibility of human connection. Elena, his housekeeper and the daughter of his landlord, desperately tries to establish a meaningful relationship with Stefano, only to be cruelly rejected by the detached engineer. From the moment she appears inside Stefano’s humble dwelling, it is apparent that Elena possesses distinct characteristics that set her apart from the other villagers: Fra i clamori la donna gli sorrise pallidamente: così faceva sempre, incontrandolo. Aveva un viso grassoccio e smorto; vestiva di un nero tranquillo. Vedova o separata da un marito che l’aveva fatta vivere in qualche città lontana, non parlava il dialetto nemmeno con quei bambini.38 Elena’s pallor contrasts with the other dark-skinned southerners, and combined with her black widow’s wear, she seems ghastly and lifeless. Furthermore, her refusal to speak the local dialect (or perhaps her ignorance of it) render her almost as much of an outsider as Stefano himself. The narrator makes an explicit connection between her choice in language and her supposed cleanliness, noting that “[u]na cosa aveva Elena, che la distingueva dalle comari del paese: come non parlava il dialetto, così sotto la veste nera
37 Ibid., 353. 38 Ibid., 297. 13
era sempre pulita e la sua pelle bianca era dolce.”39 But although Elena and Stefano are in some way both forestieri, the engineer refuses to embrace any potential connection the two might share by rejecting her gift of the armadio meant to store his humble belongings and with it her hopes that he would permanently embrace his new surroundings. What irritates Stefano most about Elena is not necessarily her overly effusive devotion, but rather her propensity to comport herself like a mother. The housekeeper is constantly described as motherly: she caresses his hair “infantilmente,” declares herself to be his “mammina,” speaks with a “voce materna,” and Stefano constantly feels as if he is in “balìa altrui.”40 Elena, then, in some sense is Stefano’s mother, or even his motherland, with which he no longer perceives any genuine connection. Just as the only pleasure Stefano can derive from his homeland now stems from the realization that it is missing him, “[l]a seule satisfaction qu’[Elena] puisse donner à Stefano, c’est de lui laisser croire qu’elle souffre d’être loin de lui,” as Phillipe Renard aptly states.41 Adding to his callousness, the engineer chooses not to speak to her when they make love, demonstrating his desire to distance himself from the familiar, from his mother tongue, from anything that could offer him a connection to society. In fact, he finds Elena bearable only when she begins to resemble the supposed exotic local women. For example, while she warms goat’s milk for Stefano, the narrator notes that “[n]el dolce profumo caprigno che saliva dal fornello, Elena si faceva tollerabile.”42 The pleasure Stefano derives from smelling Elena’s newly acquired pastoral aroma coincides with his fixation with Concia. During the many times in which Stefano makes love to Elena, he fantasizes obsessively about the young servant girl. Thus, while Elena was “posseduta senza entusiamo,” Concia “rimarrà un frutto
39 Ibid., 303-04. 40 Ibid., 303; Ibid., 298; Ibid., 336; Ibid., 310. 41 Philippe Renard, Pavese: prison de l’imaginaire, lieu de l’écriture (Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1996), 43. 42 Pavese, Carcere, 219. 14
proibito.”43 More than the forbidden fruit, however, she is an imagined fruit, one that fully reveals Pavese’s vision of Brancaleone as an ahistorical Grecian territory. According to Giovanni Carteri, “È la serva scalza Concia che simboleggia una femminilità incerta come in un mito pre-greco, fra la donna e la capra e colora con la sua sensualità sfrenata la solitudine di Pavese.”44 Although she is physically untouchable, Stefano envisions Concia permeating the land, saturating it with her timeless, mythical presence. He tries in vain to fuse with his fantastical servant girl by imbibing her: Scendeva con l’acqua un sapore terroso, aspro contro i denti, che Stefano godeva più dell’acqua e gli pareva il sapore stesso dell’anfora. C’era dentro qualcosa di caprigno, selvatico e insieme dolcissimo, che ricordava il colore dei gerani. Anche la donna scalza, come tutto il paese, andava ad attinger acqua con un’anfora come quella. [. . .]. Quella di Stefano era lievemente rosata, come una guancia esotica.45 But just as river water flows through the fingers of those who attempt to impede its course, Concia is “inafferabile,” and her very value lies in her elusiveness.46 It is hardly surprising, then, that after Giannino takes Stefano to the casa dei gerani and the engineer sees the object of his desire in flesh and blood, Concia loses her mystical appeal. Suddenly, Stefano understands the nature of his self-deception and realizes that he has merely fantasized “l’estate trascorsa” and “il fianco ruvido dell’anfora.”47 A rapid string of events leads to the collapse of Stefano’s precariously constructed life in exile: Elena refuses to be further subjected to his cruelty, Giannino is thrown in jail, and the engineer receives his long awaited pardon, leaving him with no further ties to the land of his confinement. He soon leaves on the same train which brought him to the land of his exile, but not before realizing the motives behind his own
43 Enzo Romeo, Cesare Pavese al confino di Brancaleone 1935-1936 (Cosenza: Editoriale progetto 2000, 1986), 83, 83. 44 Giovanni Carteri, Fiori d’Agave: Atmosfere e miti del Sud nell’opera di Cesare Pavese (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1993), 20. 45 Pavese, Carcere, 291. 46 Ibid., 312. 47 Ibid., 329, 329. 15
objectification of the young servant girl: “Fu pensando alla barriera invisibile che aveva interposto tra sé e Concia, che sospettò la prima volta chiaramente il suo male e gli diede un nome risoluto.”48 Stefano both purposely fails to form a meaningful relationship with the townsmen or Elena and manages to create a wall between himself and Concia by imbuing her with fantastical, mythological qualities that render her non-existent. Within Il carcere, Stefano’s treatment and interaction with the mezzogiorno illustrate not only the complex relations between northern and southern Italians, but, more importantly, the ultimate inability and refusal of the protagonist to fashion any lasting connection with society.
48 Ibid., 354. 16
Chapter 3: Calvino in viaggio: Postmodern Pastiche in Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore and Le città invisibili
While Pavese uses his protagonist’s failed relationships with Elena and Concia in order to demonstrate the pervasive solitude of modern society, Calvino uses images of women in a more subtle and ironic manner. In Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, the Lettore often finds himself reading stories that take place in distant and sometimes imaginary territories and include unusual women who embroil the different protagonists in various intrigues. On the other hand, in Le città invisibili, women serve little active function, but are often depicted inhabiting the whimsical cities (which all feature feminine names) described by Marco Polo. In both books, then, female characters and traits are used in order to allow the various male protagonists to understand, and often dominate, the unfamiliar territory in which they find themselves. A close examination of these two texts, along with Calvino’s various travelogues, reveals that the author is aware of his protagonists’ and, arguably, his own reductive fantasies using woman as other in the name of conquest. However, his moments of self-reflection do little to question the western male gaze, instead only functioning to reinforce the established patriarchy.
ORIENTALISM IN CALVINO’S TRAVEL LITERATURE
In his own travelogues, Italo Calvino subjects women to his watchful, intrusive gaze in an attempt to neatly contain the complex cultures he visits. Specifically, his Diario americano, Corrispondenze dagli Stati Uniti, Taccuino di viaggio nell’Unione Sovietica, and Collezione di sabbia, which includes short accounts of his visits to Japan, Mexico, and Iran, all contain striking descriptions of local women. Much like Pavese’s Brancaleone, some of these countries (United States, Russia, Mexico) cannot be considered eastern in the traditional Orientalist sense. Nevertheless, their relative foreignness to the Italian author creates enough of a lingual and cultural discrepancy to provoke Calvino’s capacity for imaginative appropriation. With respect to his American 17
writings, for example, Paola Castelluci notes that “[l]a riscoperta dell’America viene presentata da Calvino come metafora del rapporto con il nuovo in generale, della difficoltà nel rapportarsi con l’ignoto, riconoscerlo come tale, e passare poi a elaborare opportune modalità per entrare in relazione con esso.”49 I argue that one of the primary ways in which he enters into such a relationship with l’ignoto is by writing, or appropriating, the bodies and voices of its women. In both his Diario americano and Corrispondenze, for example, Calvino devotes page upon page to descriptions of and encounters with American girls. One of the most relevant accounts, entitled “La Newyorkese,” involves his desperate attempt to find an American girlfriend. Calvino explains, “Io che sempre, arrivato in un posto, non vedo l’ora di conoscere la vera rappresentante di quella civiltà, il prototipo, non potevo certo lamentarmi di Joan, la prima girl-friend newyorkese.”50 Here the author discloses both his anxiousness to find the epitome of Americanness as well as his propensity to identify ‘woman’ with ‘nation.’ Unfortunately for Calvino, however, he soon discovers that Joan is actually the daughter of Russian immigrants. After dumping her in the hopes of finding the ‘authentic’ New Yorker, he realizes that most of his other potential love interests are also Russian, with the exception of Annie, the Pole. He finally succeeds in finding a nice girl from a “vecchia famiglia inglese, presbiteriana: old settlers” but the relationship soon flops.51 Although Calvino eventually realizes that the true New Yorker is, in fact, the immigrant, the anecdote nevertheless reveals his desire to know the other nation through the other sex. This desire continues to manifest itself in his other travel writings. His Taccuino di viaggio nell’Unione Sovietica begins with a piece entitled “Le ragazze di Lvov” in which he describes his initial impressions of Russian girls: Nel binario vicino, su un vagone merci, vedo due ragazze—forse contadine che caricano sacchi—col fazzoletto in testa, i giacconi
49 Paola Castellucci, Un modo per stare al mondo: Italo Calvino e l’America (Bari: Adriatica, 1999), 101. 50 Italo Calvino, “Descrizione e Reportages: Corrispondenze dagli Stati Uniti (1960-1961)” in Saggi (1945-1985), 2: 2611. 51 Ibid,. 2612. 18
imbottiti e gli stivali. Guardano e ridono. Sono le prime ragazze sovietiche che incontro; il buon giorno si vede dal mattino. [. . .] Ragazze semplici, non dipinte, allegre. Confermano le impressioni sulle ragazze sovietiche che già avevo sentito da altri, ma non c’è per nulla un tipo di ragazza standardizzato.52 Calvino’s preoccupation with the appearance of these women at the outset of his journey once again suggests his desire to familiarize himself with the new territory through its women. At the same time, however, his attempts to do so are somewhat paradoxical, as he claims that somehow these women look exactly as expected but yet fail to conform to a single mold. Nevertheless, Calvino does succeed in directly connecting these assorted women to their own homeland. As his train chugs through the Soviet landscape, passing through station after station, the author weaves depictions of these ragazze into the descriptions of his view from his passenger window, linking the body of the country to the body of its females.53 Similarly, in Collezione di sabbia, Calvino’s reflections on Japan begin with a piece entitled “La vecchia signora in chimono viola,” which extensively details his observations of two Japanese women, a young girl and her older travel companion, on a train travelling from Tokyo to Kyoto. As he intently watches the two women, one young and one old, he begins to conjecture as to their possible relationship, seeing the girl as a “casalinga,” “un’apparizione d’altri tempi,” while the vecchia seems to possess more
52 Italo Calvino, “Descrizione e Reportages: Taccuino di viaggio nell’Unione Sovietica (1952)” in Saggi (1945-1985), 2: 2409-11. 53 Calvino’s copious meticulous descriptions of Russian women continue throughout the diary. In the train: “Al nostro vagone sono addetti una ferroviera e un ferroviere. La donna ci prepara il tè,” ibid., 2410; “La radio nel corridoio trasmette una canzone poplare. È una donna che canta,” ibid., 2453. In Moscow: “Il più bravo dei nostri tre interpreti è una ragazza, T.G. studentessa d’italiano all’Istituto di Filologia,” ibid., 2415; “non posso fare i conti in tasca alla gente vedendola passare, e di queste rosee ragazze col cappotto bordato di pelliccia che passano a tre, a Quattro, a braccetto” ibid., 2416; “È un pubblico ben diverso da tutti gli altri [. . .]. Forse chi dà il tono dono queste ragazze non dipinte, molte con le trecce, con le camicette di seta artificiale,” ibid., 2422. At a station in Daghestan: “Ad una stazione vengono donne sotto i finestrini a vendere yogurt e carne cruda,” ibid., 2455; “Le donne sono tipi tra il siciliano e il turco,” ibid., etc. 19
“elementi occidentali, anzi americani.”54 At the same time, Calvino reads the Japan Times, which is full of articles discussing the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Emperor’s reign, the resulting political demonstrations, and the lingering social effects of the second World War, such that his “attenzione è divisa tra il leggere i commenti sull’Imperatore e l’osservare la vecchia signora impassibile.”55 Calvino consciously ties the older woman to her nation’s ongoing narrative, thus inscribing Japanese history upon her. As he watches the two women, however, Calvino soon finds himself irritated by the arrogant, taciturn demeanor of the old woman while the young girl dotes upon her travel companion and tries to make lighthearted conversation. He angrily resists the urge to reprimand her in a language she could never understand: “«Ma non sai, scema, che da noi in Occidente mai più sarà possible a nessuno essere servito come sei servita tu? Non sai che in Occidente nessun vecchio sarà mai più trattato con tanta devozione da una giovane?»”56 Calvino impulsively tries to stuff this Japanese anecdote into his own familiar western framework in a desperate attempt to understand the seemingly strange domestic dynamic while simultaneously representing the two women, without knowledge or consent, in a language incapable of capturing the nuances of their customs. He further explains that “solo rappresentandomi il conflitto come qualcosa che avviene dentro me stesso, posso sperare di penetrarne il segreto, di decifrarlo”; thus, he admits the impossibility of knowing a culture objectively from the outside.57 At the same time, I argue that he does not attempt to understand the conflict from within himself, but rather from the outside, via the female body. Once again, then, the author succeeds in appropriating images of the foreign woman in attempts to understand a culture that eludes him.
54 Italo Calvino, Collezione di sabbia (Milano: Mondadori, 1994) 168; Ibid.; Ibid. 55 Ibid., 171. 56 Ibid., 173. 57 Ibid. 20
SE UNA NOTTE D’INVERNO UN VIAGGIATORE: A PASTICHE OF HETEROSEXUAL MALE
FANTASY Although these accounts of unfamiliar females might initially seem incidental to Calvino’s body of work as a whole, his travelogues are, in fact, foundational texts, which, as Catharine Mee notes, “illustrate his response to encounters with new cultures [and feed] into his other writing, directly, or in more abstract ways.”58 In Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, threads from Calvino’s travelogues occasionally materialize within the woven work that hark back to his numerous observations of foreign women. Within the fragments that take place in foreign or imaginary lands emerges the idea that women are interchangeable, faceless objects that lack an identity until a male protagonist creates one for them. The second fragment, Fuori dell’abitato di Malbork, takes place in a city called Kudgiwa and features Slavic-sounding names. Although it seems as though Kudgiwa is merely a figment of Calvino’s imagination, it may be an allusion to the Polish city of Kudowa-Zdrój, recalling, if only vaguely, the author’s travels within the U.S.S.R. In any case, ‘Calvino,’ disguised as an unknown Polish author, once again exhibits his penchant for ogling foreign women in the opening paragraphs of the story, as Gritzvi watches Brigd prepare food in the family kitchen: “A ogni su e giù del busto di Brigd sul tavolo di marmo, le sottane da dietro si sollevano di qualche centrimetro e mostrano l’incavo tra polpaccio e bicipite femorale dove la pelle è più bianca, solcata da una sottile vena celeste.”59 This description is somehow reminiscent of Calvino’s verbal snapshots of Russian women “col fazzoletto in testa” e “i giacconi imbottiti,” as Brigd’s objectified body is similarly tied to her nebulous, Slavic surroundings.60 As the story progresses, it becomes more apparent that the female body, instead of the individual Brigd, who does not utter a word to him or anyone else in the story, is the
58 Catharine Mee, “The Myopic Eye: Calvino's Travels in the USA and the USSR,” MLR 100, no. 4 (2005): 987 in JSTOR [database online], 7 Nov. 2010. 59 Italo Calvino, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, (Milano: Mondadori, 1994), 39. 60 Calvino, “Descrizione e reportages,” 2409. 21
focus of Gritzvi’s attention. As the narrator prepares to change places with Ponko, he realizes that each of them will have the chance to court the other’s love interest. Ponko and Gritzvi come to blows, and as the two boys begin to throw punches, the narrator ponders the interchangeability of Brigd and Zwida: “Cerco inutilmente di stringere nel groviglio di membra maschili contrapposte e identiche, quei fantasmi femminili che svaniscono nella loro diversità irraggiungibile. [. . .] [Q]uella che cercavo era una figura bifronte, una Brigd-Zwida.”61 The narrator is not interested in a genuine relationship with Brigd, but rather in possessing a hybridized, yet singular, ‘woman’ that will allow him to assert his dominance over Ponko, the competition, as well as over Brigd and Zwida, the prized objects, both inside and outside of Kudgiwa. The testosterone-driven competition continues in Senza temere il vento e la vertigine, wherein two men, the narrator Alex Zinnober and his friend Valeriano, both set their eyes upon Irina Piperin, the enigmatic and devious love (or perhaps merely sex) interest. The novel once again takes place in Eastern Europe, but here the country, Cimmeria, is completely fictionalized. However, like in Fuori dell’abitato di Malbork, the imaginary setting playfully alludes to Calvino’s travels through the U.S.S.R. in 1952. In an obvious reference to the formation of the Soviet Union, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii explains to the Lettore, Ludmilla, and Lotaria before they begin reading that “le province che formavano lo Stato cimmerio, siano entrate, dopo la Seconda Guerra Modiale, a far parte della Repubblica Popolare Cimbrica.”62 In this fragment, Cimmeria seems to be under martial law, and the narrator meets Irina the day in which, perhaps not coincidentally, “il fronte aveva ceduto a meno di dodici chilometri dalla Porta Orientale.”63 During their first encounter, Alex makes every effort to prevent Irina from collapsing as they march along with throngs of others over the Ponte di Ferro (perhaps a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Iron Curtain) in order to evacuate the city. Although at first Irina is depicted as a frail woman in need of
61 Calvino, Se una notte, 44-45. 62 Ibid., 86. 63 Ibid., 91 (emphasis mine). 22
support, the outspoken and dominating woman lets Alex know, with “una punta d’asprezza, quasi di risentimento,” that one day the situation will be reversed and he will instead be made to rely upon her.64 In contrast to Brigd, then, Irina appears to be a strong female figure with a voice of her own and without the need of male support. Nevertheless, she soon becomes embroiled in the fantasies of both Alex and Valeriano. One day, the narrator goes to visit his friend at work, only to discover that “l’ufficio di Valeriano è ingombro di cineserie da boudoir: vasi con draghi, scrigni laccati, un paravento di seta.”65 Alex asks his friend, “‘E chi vuoi intrappolare in questa pagoda? Una regina orientale?’”66 To his surprise, it is Irina who responds as she emerges from behind the screen with a sarcastic retort: “‘I sogni maschili non cambiano, con la rivoluzione.’”67 Here, Calvino acknowledges the existence of the Orientalist project but does little to question its treatment of women: Irina admittedly pinpoints the propensity of men to objectify foreign, exotic females in attempt to contain faraway lands, but she does not seem to realize, or care, that she herself has become such a figure. Although the ‘revolution’ to which Irina refers is most likely the Cimmerian one, her dry retort is also applicable to postmodernism. As Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon explain, despite the similar end goals of feminism and postmodernism in destabilizing the idea of the cohesive patriarchy, postmodern thought has the potential to further disenfranchise women because it proposes the destruction of essentializing categories.68 Without “the politically enabling category of ‘Woman,’” women have little ground left “on which to make a stand against their oppression.”69 Thus, in the words of Teresa De Lauretis, even in the postmodern world, it is still “the absent Woman, the one pursued in dreams and found only in memory or fiction, that serves as the guarantee of
64 Ibid., 97. 65 Ibid., 98. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon, Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 108; Ibid., 113. 69 Ibid.; Ibid. 23
masculinity, anchoring male identity and supporting man’s creativity and self- representation.”70 While I would like to believe that Calvino at least recognizes the problematic aspects of the postmodern revolution with respect to feminism, in the end he offers no effective critique of its shortcomings and refuses to give alternatives to his female characters. Irina not only appears as trapped within Valeriano’s pagoda, but she is also confined within the pages written by Calvino (disguised as Vorts Viljandi, disguised as Ukko Ahti) as the standard hyper-sexualized, rebellious Russian (or Cimmerian) spy á là Bond girl Tatiana Romanova. Yet again, the narrator’s focus drifts to Irina’s body, as the trio begins to engage in many a late-night ménage-a-trois in which “Irina è insieme l’officiante e la divinità e la profanatrice e la vittima.”71 Although, within the novel fragment, Irina appears to be in control of her relationship with Alex and Valeriano, I would argue that she only functions to fulfill another common, stereotypical heterosexual male fantasy—that of the controlling and demanding dominatrix. It should come as no surprise that Calvino has already encountered a similar Russian woman during his travels: La donna che dirige il vagone ristorante è un bel tipo di russa. Alta, castana, con una faccia bella e fiera, un corpo in cui il petto grande e i fianchi stretti accentuano l’aria risoluta. Veste un lungo golf di lana come fosse in casa. Lancia occhiate severe: ieri, quando ha visto che nessuno di noi riusciva a mangiare la rossa zuppa ucraina, pareva allarmata. Oggi che facciamo festa ai piatti tutti più o meno di nostro gusto, l’ho vista sorridere per la prima volta. Ho idea che qui siano le donne a comandare tutto.72 In this excerpt, Calvino succeeds in taking one beautiful yet stern Russian woman and extending her characteristics to the rest of her countrywomen to simplify what would
70 Teresa De Lauretis, “Calvino and the Amazons Reading the (Post)Modern Text” in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 82. 71 Calvino, Se una notte, 100. 72 Calvino, “Descrizione e reportages,” 2412. 24
otherwise be the unmanageable diversity of the USSR. As we have seen, Calvino uses a similar image of woman in Fuori dell’abitato di Malbork in order to play to male fantasies and preconceptions of Eastern European women. While the more Westernized novel fragments Guarda in basso dove l’ombra s’addensa and In una rete di linee che s’intersecano also feature indistinguishable and interchangeable female figures, the eighth story, Sul tappeto di foglie illuminate dalla luna, with its Japanese backdrop and stereotypical characters, merits a closer examination. In the opening pages, the narrator, a student living with his professor, is attempting to separate every individual leaf of Ginkgo as they fall from the tree. This opening is pulled almost directly from Calvino’s experiences in Japan; in “La spada e le foglie,” the author describes walking through the gardens of Kyoto, watching maple leaves as they fall into a creek. Although Sul tappeto di foglie illuminate dalla luna is supposedly written by a Japanese author named Takukumi Ikoka, it seems as though the work has been translated exclusively for a Western audience, given that the ‘translator’ feels the need to clarify that the keiakì tree is known in Europe as the “olmo del Caucaso.”73 Furthermore, the name and nationality of the narrator are never revealed, and although it is likely that he too is Japanese, his place as an outsider living with signor Okeda, his wife, and his daughter, creates tension in the household. The student finds himself enamored with his professor’s daughter, Makiko, and he asks her to meet him under the Gingko tree that night. The narrator is the one to tell us that his love interest instead requests a rendezvous at the laghetto; like Brigd, Makiko is incapable of speaking for herself and the student instead intervenes on her behalf. In this way, Calvino succeeds in characterizing the Japanese woman, without her knowledge or permission, much as Gustav Flaubert did with his Egyptian lover Kuchuk Hanem. As Said says of the Bibliothèque des idees reçues, “There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never
73 Calvino, Se una notte, 241. 25
represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for her and represented her.”74 In this novel fragment, a similar construction takes place, not only in the appropriation of Makiko’s speech acts, but also in the depiction of her body. Once again, the narrator fixates upon the young girl’s appearance as she serves the men tea: “Mentre si chinava, vidi sulla sua nuca nuda sotto i capelli raccolti in alto una sottile lanugine nera che sembrava continuare lungo il filo della schiena.”75 While this description is somewhat conservative in comparison to the orgiastic scene in Senza temere il vento e la vertigine, it, too, soon becomes wrought with eroticism, as the student finds himself quite literally trapped between the girl and her mother: [L]e due donne si tenevano dietro le mie spalle protendendo le braccia una da una parte, una dall’altra. A un certo momento sentii un contatto in un punto preciso, tra il braccio e la schiena, all’altezza delle prime costole [. . .]. Dalla parte della signorina Makiko era una punta tesa e compulsante, mentre dalla parte della signora Miyagi una pressione insinuante, di striscio. Compresi che per un caso raro e gentile ero stato sfiorato nello stesso istante dal capezzolo sinistro della figlia e dal capezzolo destro della madre.76 The sexual tension continues to build throughout the story until Makiko sees the narrator making love to her mother the same evening he had promised to come meet her by the lake. In the heat of passion, he accidentally cries out the daughter’s name and ruins his relationship with both women in a somewhat comical, ‘Mrs. Robinson’-esque moment. Here, Calvino caricatures another stereotypical male fantasy, the sexual encounter with both mother and daughter, but to what end? This scene lacks the critical, satirical element that would problematize such reductive desires and thus remains, at best, a pastiche.
74 Said, Orientalism, 6. 75 Calvino, Se una notte, 234. 76 Ibid., 236. 26
In his authoritative book on hypertexts, Gérard Genette clarifies the difference between parody and pastiche, explaining that the nineteenth century Larousse French dictionary had already begun to differentiate “a serious pastiche from a satirical or demonstrative one, which, when it pushes the caricature too far, deserves rather to be called parody.”77 Thus, although the difference between the two genres is at times subjective, a pastiche differs from the more scathing parody in that it “abstains from any marginal appraisal.”78 The well-known pastiches of Marcel Proust, for example, preserve the voices of authors like Balzac and Flaubert with a purpose that is “neither purely satiric nor purely admiring,” in the end marked entirely by the “irreducible ambiguity of [their] teasing, in which mockery is a way of loving and irony (understand who must) only a byway of tenderness.”79 Similarly, I argue that while the fragments that make up Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore may gently mock commercialized ‘best-seller’ writing from various genres, the detached irony Calvino uses to do so ultimately fails to question these styles, which have traditionally relegated women to secondary, if not objectified, positions.80 The placement of the mother-daughter male fantasy onto the bodies of two speechless ‘Oriental’ women, much like the ones Calvino observes in his Japanese train car, further complicates the fragment’s ambiguous treatment of women. As in the travelogues, Calvino uses these sexual encounters with objectified foreign women in order to access and contain an enigmatic foreign culture. In other words, by removing the chimono, the narrator feels as though he has eliminated the barrier to knowing the mysterious secrets of the other. Meyda Yegenoglu makes an analogous argument about western men confronting the Middle Eastern veil. She argues that the “opaque, all-
77 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 89. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 120; Ibid. 80 See also Wu Ming 1, “New Italian Epic versione 2.0: Memorandum 1993-2008: narrativa, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro,” (2008), http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/WM1_saggio_sul_new_italian_epic.pdf, (accessed March 27, 2011), 13, in which the author discusses the tendency of more recent works to “rigetta[re] il tono distaccato e gelidamente ironico da pastiche postmodernista.” 27
encompassing veil seems to place her body out of the reach of the Western gaze and desire,” as it “[erects] a barrier between the body of the Oriental woman and the Western gaze.”81 The gaze proceeds to subject the mysterious, veiled object to “a relentless investigation” after becoming “[f]rustrated with the invisibility and inaccessibility of this mysterious, fantasmatic figure.”82 Similarly, Calvino’s narrator sets his eye upon disrobing his Oriental women in the hopes of knowing her and dominating her. The pastiche of male fantasy continues in the penultimate fragment, Intorno a una fossa vuota, which presumably unfolds in an early twentieth century Mexican landscape. The narrator, Nacho Zamora, returns to his birthplace, Oquedal, to find his mother after his father’s death. The village is insular and isolated; as Anacleta Higueras, the Alvarado family cook, explains, “‘Tutti i nati a Oquedal si somigliano. Indios e bianchi hanno facce che si confondono. Siamo un villaggio di poche famiglie isolato sulle montagne. Da secoli ci sposiamo solo tra noi.’”83 The resemblance between the inhabitants is a source of both confusion and eroticism for Nacho. Because either Anacleta or Doña Jazmina could be his mother, his aggressive interest in both of their daughters, Amaranta and Jacinta, plays off the incest taboo. Nacho assaults both girls, but both Anacleta and Jazmina manage to stop him from carrying out any more malicious intentions. Nevertheless, Nacho’s violent appropriation of the bodies of these native Oquedans is one way in which the narrator himself, as a spurned outsider, attempts to integrate into a society that once rejected him, and Calvino, as a foreign author, succeeds in imitating the voice of a native author and delimiting another culture with a reductive and stereotypical depiction of females as passive objects made for conquest.
LE CITTÀ INVISIBILI: CONSTRUCTING THE ORIENT AROUND THE FEMALE BODY While in Se una notte un viaggiatore, the woman’s body still remains physically separate from the landscape, in Le città invisibili, woman and territory become one, as
81 Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies : Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39; Ibid. 82 Ibid.; Ibid. 83 Calvino, Se una notte, 266. 28
each of the fifty-five cities features a female name. The explicit links between the whimsical cities within the experimental novel and Calvino’s travelogues may seem to dwindle, but it is important to note that the overall concept likely originated in his many voyages abroad, during which he began to capture “lively and detailed descriptions of the visible cities of America and the Soviet Union” in his various notebooks.84 Explicit references to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Kyoto appear in passing toward the end of the book when the Gran Kan shows Marco Polo his spectacular, futuristic atlases. Returning to the function of females within Le città invisibili, I argue that the feminized cities and the women they contain function as a way for Marco Polo to manage the vastness of the Orient, to colonize the unknown and place it within neatly contained tales in order to please the emperor Khan. As Cristina della Coletta explains, “La donna, come Venezia, rappresenta allora l’eterna potenzialità e coniuga un desiderio sempre rinnovabile perché mai esaudito.”85 Just as Marco Polo uses the image of Venice as a reference point for the reconstruction of his memories, the image of woman is exploited by Calvino as a way to approach “[l]a profonda differenza ontologica e geografica dell’Oriente.”86 Beyond the use of women’s names for physical cities, Polo’s tales frequently depict female inhabitants in a sexualized manner. As Malgorzata Myk observes, in the first city (assuming one decides to read the labyrinthine book from cover to cover), Diomira, a woman may be heard seductively moaning “uh!” from a terrace as the traveler passes by.87 Myk also notes that this is one of the only opportunities in which the woman is given the opportunity to speak in the novel, and, of course, as we have seen, this is one
84 Mee, “The Myopic Eye,” 991. 85 Cristina Della Coletta, “L'Oriente tra ripetizione e differenza nelle ‘Città invisibili’ di Italo Calvino,” Studi Novecenteschi: Rivista Semestrale di Storia della Letteratura Italiana Contemporanea 24 no. 54 (1997): 423. 86 Ibid. 87 Malgorzata Myk, “The Immemorial Waters of Venice: Woman as Anodyne in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities,” Explicator 67, no. 3 (2009): 222 in JSTOR [database online], 7 Nov. 2010; Calvino, Le città invisibili, 7. 29
method the male traveler frequently uses to mold his own model of the Oriental woman. To be fair, Polo’s descriptions do not often give any of the cities’ citizens the opportunity to speak. Nevertheless, the fact that interactions between the subjects and Marco Polo are minimal throughout the book indicates his propensity to speak for the other in more general, gender-neutral terms. The overtly erotic depictions continue throughout Le città invisibili, often including seminude women depicted in the midst of their “daily activities and elicit pleasures.”88 In Despina, every lit-up window exhibits a woman combing her hair, while in Anastasia, ladies take baths in garden tubs and often ask the (male) passerby to join them.89 In Ipazia, the traveler enters into the stable “per vedere le belle donne che montano in sella con le cosce nude e i gambali sui polpacci,” but as soon as the women see a young foreigner approach, “lo rovesciano su mucchi di fieno o di segatura e lo premono con i saldi capezzoli.”90 This scene recalls the young narrator from Sul tappeto di foglie illuminate dalla luna as he is pressed between the “capezzolo sinistro della figlia e dal capezzolo destro della madre,” and similarly, in Ipazia, Polo experiences the city through his sexual encounters with its women.91 In addition to the fact that these foreign women are being hypersexualized, these women are depicted as faceless and indistinguishable. Much like the male protagonists in relation to the hybridized, muddled figures of Brigd-Zwida, Miyagi-Makiko, Anacleta- Amaranta, and Jazmina-Jacinta in Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, Polo wishes to know a generalized, universal ‘woman,’ and the Venetian thus seems conveniently incapable of distinguishing between each city’s individual female inhabitants. For example, Polo tells Kan that, in the city of Isidora, “quando il forestiero è incerto tra due donne ne incontra sempre una terza.”92 Similarly, in Dorothea, women are compared to interchangeable goods, as “le ragazze da marito di ciascun quartiere si sposano con
88 Myk, “The Immemorial Waters,” 222. 89 Calvino, Le città invisibili, 17, 12. 90 Ibid., 48. 91 Calvino, Se una notte, 236. 92 Calvino, Le città invisibili, 8. 30
giovani di altri quartieri e le loro famiglie si scambiano le mercanzie che ognuna ha in privativa.”93 In one of the cities of the dead, Adelma, Polo cannot manage to separate the faces of the inhabitants (both male and female) from people he once knew in Italy but who have since passed on. Two of the inhabitants he sees remind him of women from home: “Un’erbivendola pesava una verza sulla stadera e la metteva in un paniere appeso a una cordicella che una ragazza calava da un balcone. La ragazza era uguale a una del mio paese che era impazzita d’amore e s’era uccisa. L’erbivendola alzò il viso: era mia nonna.”94 Polo reasons that, if Adelma exists outside of his dreams, it is better not to look at the faces of its inhabitants lest “le somiglianze si dissolvano e appaiano facce estranee.”95 Steven Shankman comments upon the traveler’s fear of encountering a unique other: Marco is unable to respond to the alterity of the human face of the inhabitants of this city. The faces are reduced to phenomena that appear. They are not traces of an alterity that would disrupt presence. Each face that Marco sees, rather that being the occasion for transcendence into the ethical sphere, is instead an instance of a phenomenal reality that he readily assimilates (or wishes to assimilate), since each face he encounters reminds him of a face that he has already seen; [. . .] these faces stare at him demanding a recognition that he finds burdensome.96 By equating each face in Adelma to a familiar, ‘safe’ figure from his past, Polo is able to escape a confrontation with the immeasurable differences and irreducible heterogeneity that await him in the Orient. As della Coletta explains, “la cultura occidentale ha guadagnato forza e identità rovesciando tali immagini e presentando l’Oriente come proiezione dell’Occidente, attraverso una logica governata non dalla realtà empirica, ma
93 Ibid., 9. 94 Ibid., 95-96. 95 Ibid., 95. 96 Steven Shankman, “The Difference between Difference and Otherness: Il milione of Marco Polo and Calvino’s Le città invisibili” in Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies (New York: State University of New York Press, 2010), 51. 31
da un insieme di desideri, repressioni, investimenti emotive e memoriali, proiezioni consce e inconsce.”97 Polo thus projects faces of the Occident onto those of the Orient in order to contain that which is foreign to him. While, admittedly, the Venetian uses this technique to approach both foreign women and men in the city of Adelma, his failure to differentiate between females, or to see them as unique individuals with an identity independent of the Western male gaze, in this and other invisible cities, is yet another way in which the young traveler attempts to contain the vastness of the Orient through the female body, placing both territory and body within short vignettes so that he may report his findings back to the Gran Kan in an attempt to convince the leader that he is still in control of his empire. In Zobeide, these efforts at containment become even more deliberate, as men literally construct the city around the body of the female. According to Polo, the city was founded after foreign males from “nazioni diverse” all dreamt in unison about a nude woman running through an unknown city at night.98 Upon awakening, all of the men went off to search for the city, and after searching in vain, they collaboratively decided to rebuild Zobeide using the collective fantasy as a blueprint, in the hopes that one night, the nude woman would return. She never does, and after a new group of men rearranges the city to better imitate the woman’s trail, visitors cannot understand what possibly attracted them to this ugly “trappola” to begin with.99 Myk proposes that “the tale [of Zobeide] reinforces the idea of a male architect who regenerates his fantasies through mastery of the feminine element, which he relentlessly remodels according to his needs.”100 I take her argument a step further by suggesting that the city of Zobeide, founded by foreign men wanting to contain the body of an elusive, nude woman by trapping her within the walls of a city, is a microcosmic representation for the whole of Le città invisibili. Albert Sbragia explains that the text can be seen as a mis en abyme, which he defines not as “the
97 Della Coletta, “L’Oriente tra ripetizione,” 430. 98 Calvino, Le città invisibili, 45. 99 Ibid., 46. 100 Myk, “The Immemorial Waters,” 222. 32
part for the whole but the whole for the whole.”101 In other words, as a mis en abyme, Le città invisibili is a crystalline structure in which “the macroscopic text expands from its microscopic nucleus in a series of repetitive symmetries.”102 While Sbragia ends his explanation by describing Olinda, a city composed of replicas of itself, I argue that the concept of mis en abyme is also applicable to the book’s treatment of women.103 The fifty-five cities which Marco Polo constructs to please the Gran Kan all in some way or another use the image of woman as a way to recreate and reduce the seemingly unbounded territory of the Orient into neatly defined and organized vignettes, and the work as a whole functions in the same manner. Marco Polo, as we have seen, is not the only one of Calvino’s characters to inscribe the unknown onto the female body—the various male protagonists within Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore all use encounters with local women as a way to familiarize themselves with the unknown. Calvino himself makes use of this technique in his various travelogues when confronted with new cultures, and although there are moments of sly self-awareness within all of these texts, Calvino’s facetious objectifications of the foreign female nevertheless lack the critical element that would undermine the power of the Western male gaze in creating its other. Ultimately, even in, or perhaps precisely because of, the postmodern world, Calvino is dependent upon the female body for his own artistic process.
101 Albert Sbragia, “Italo Calvino’s Ordering of Chaos,” Modern Fiction Studies, 39, no. 2 (1993): 299 in Project Muse [database online]. Accessed April 3, 2011. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 33
Chapter 4: Conclusion: Pavese and Calvino Beyond Postmodernism
Unlike Calvino, Pavese was never able to experience postmodernity. His aesthetic is immutably poetic, sentimental, and modern, and the style of his novella Il carcere is no exception. The main protagonist Stefano is painfully isolated as a confinato in Southern Italy, but he is unwilling to form meaningful connections with other townspeople even when they make concerted attempts to remove him from his real and imagined confinement. Pavese, seemingly unknowingly, uses the body of two women, Elena and Concia, as tools that allow Stefano to prevent the formation of relationships with the society around him. Elena, as a motherly figure, and the mythical and elusive Concia are embodiments of Northern and Sothern Italy, and Stefano’s purposeful rejection of them both signals his decision to remain imprisoned even after the Fascist regime allows him to return home. Calvino, on the other hand, is more aware of the ways in which he uses the female body throughout his real and fictional accounts of other worlds, as he reflects, often ironically, upon this trope. Taken together, his travelogues, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, and Le città invisibili, present a highly self-conscious image of women, yet they fail to critically question the ways in which the female body has historically been used as a way to confront and appropriate foreign lands. From the speechless young Brigd and the sexy femme fatale Irina, to the feminized cities visited by Marco Polo in the name of Khan’s conquests, the presence of women within Calvino’s works shows that postmodernism is not always able to deconstruct power structures and provide meaningful forms of resistance to those segments of society perhaps most in need of its
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capacity for change. Calvino can be seen in some small way as continuing Pavese’s legacy both by realizing the travels which his friend and predecessor was unable to take and by casting images of woman and land in a postmodern light. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that one day another great Italian writer might reexamine the use of the female body throughout the history of Italian literature in order to finally revolutionize the ways in which we perceive both women and other.
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